Engaging Ideas - 6/3

A collection of recent stories and reports that sparked consideration on ways to make progress on divisive issues.

Every week we curate stories and reports on complex issues including democracy, public engagement, education, health care and urban housing.

Democracy

Is
civic technology the killer app for democracy?
(TechCrunch)
The civic disconnect between information convenience and
failing public systems is a considerable challenge. Big data might be a huge
boost to our economy, but will it help us build a better nation? Hackathons are
terrific community-building events, but we can’t code ourselves out of our
failing infrastructure. To build the killer civic app, we need to find an
ethical framework that connects technology to political leadership, to power.

Engagement

Why
early career researchers should care about public engagement (Times
Higher Education)
Many researchers don’t want to do public engagement. Few
consider it part of their core mission, many consider it a waste of their time.
As for higher education institutions, they send out a mixed message: yes,
please do it, but do it in your own time. The problem is that public engagement
is perceived as taking valuable time away from research, which is already
compressed by teaching and administration. It also requires a considerable
amount of preparation and even training to deliver effectively. In much the
same way that interdisciplinary research projects open hitherto unimagined
avenues for research, generalist conversations at public events can provide new
perspectives and shift your perception of a subject. Talking at literary
festivals, appearing in the media and writing blog posts forces you to express
your ideas with added clarity. You learn that making a valid point or providing
astute criticism does not imply using convoluted sentence structures and
deliberately obtuse vocabulary.

K-12 Education

U.S.
Graduation Rate Rises, But Critical Gaps Remain (EdWeek)
A record-setting 82 percent of the class of 2014 graduated on
time, the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education show, but
American Indian, black, and Latino students continue to trail their white
peers.

Bill
Aims to Ease Teacher Mobility Across States (EdWeek)
The proposal, introduced May 26 by Rep. Andre Carson, D-Ind.,
would set up an application process for teachers in participating states to
move to another without having to meet additional coursework or other
requirements. Participating states would have to administer at least one
content test before a teacher could begin in the classroom, plus one general
pedagogy and one performance-based test within a year after the teacher begins
to teach. The proposal would allow the U.S. Secretary of Education to award
grants to "an eligible entity" to set up this process, but that's the
extent of the feds' involvement. One wrinkle: Even when states use the same
tests, they often set very different passing or "cutoff" scores—sometimes
at very low levels. So the bill says that states' tests would have to be
"identified as sufficiently rigorous" by a third-party organization
like the Council of Chief State School Officers. The proposal is modeled on the
recommendations from a 2014
report from centrist think-tank Third Way.

Report:
Workforce Readiness Survey (McGraw-Hill Education)
Community college students generally feel just as prepared
for careers and satisfied with their higher education experiences as their
peers at 4-year colleges.

This
Professor Enrolled as an Undercover Student (The Chronicle of
Higher Education)
Mr. Cross, 35, described what motivated him, how he
occasionally got busted when students recognized him in class, and the lessons
he took to heart: “I’ve been in so many meetings where we as professors gripe
about students and their excuses. There’s always going to be some who are
slacking, but the vast majority aren’t deciding between watching a Game of
Thrones marathon and turning in a research paper. More likely, they’re choosing
whether to take their mom to a doctor’s appointment, go to a kid’s play, or do
this paper. Sometimes schoolwork gets the short end of the stick.”

Unpaid,
stressed, and confused: patients are the health care system's free labor (Vox)
What I didn't understand was the burden patients face in
managing the health care: a massive web of doctors, insurers, pharmacies, and
other siloed actors that seem intent on not talking with one another. That
unenviable task gets left to the patient, the secret glue that holds the system
together. For me, this feels like a part-time job where the pay is lousy, the
hours inconvenient, and the stakes incredibly high. It's up to me to ferry
medical records between different providers, to track down a pharmacy that can
fill my prescription, and to talk to my insurance when a treatment gets denied
to find out why.